I Do Movies Badly: Crimson Peak

by ·
September 19, 2018

Past Jim had three main complaints the last time he watched Crimson Peak: everything was too on-the-nose, the scares weren’t scary, and the relationships didn’t work. Current Jim is here to explain why those complaints are stupid and why Crimson Peak is excellent.

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Is it necessarily the case that the “gothic” genre must be on-the-nose? “The Innocents” would seem to be an example of the genre, and the story is subtle enough that people still debate whether there are actually any ghosts or if the unnamed protagonist is just losing her mind.

And yet, in the introduction to the novel “The Haunting of Hill House” written by Laura Miller, she asserts that both Shirley Jackson and Henry James, who wrote the novel upon with The Innocents was based, “gave every indication that they considered the ghosts in their short novels to be ‘real’ within the fictional world that their books describe . . . But both of these writers were too preoccupied with the notion that people are attended by multiple, imaginary versions of themselves to be unaware of the nonsupernatural implications of their ghost stories.”